Saturday, August 21, 2010

Van Morrison and the Technique of How to Live

Whenever I read I highlight, but in a peculiar way. I don't highlight for facts or ideas. Rather, I only highlight things that, for whatever reason, resonate with me on some deeper level.

When I finish a book, I go back and re-read what I have highlighed, which reinforces that Resonant Thing inside of me. My posts often consist of articulating and amplifying this resonance, so that hopefully it will resonate in you as well. (In my book this is symbolized ≈. That with which ≈ resonates is ¶.)

I finally finished this book on Van Morrison that I started reading at least a couple of months ago. This morning I've decided to review the scattered passages I highlighted. In what follows, you may see that a kind of narrative emerges, one that is certainly relevant to me, but perhaps to you as well.

"I don't want to just sing a song... anyone can do that... something else has got to happen" (VM).

America exists as an emotional idea, both within its own people and the wider world.

The BBC depended upon imported American records during the Second World War.

Port cities throughout the UK emerged as centres of Britain's growing popular music scene.

... jazz, blues, country records, all saturated with the spirit of America, the sound of a far-off new world dream, where even songs of poverty, hard work and harder luck seemed magical.

"Blues isn't to do with black or white; blues is about the truth, and blues is the truth" (VM).

... if 'having the blues' is a cultural shorthand for feeling down, then 'singing the blues' is surely something else -- suggestive of resistance and endurance.

Sun's going down, nightfall gonna catch me here. --Robert Johnson

... the blues can sound like anything -- it is in performance that they become "truth."

"I wanted to make my own blues, my own soul music, to do something of my own with it. That's where I'm coming from" (VM).

So he wanted to take the tradition, and innovate within and beyond it.

... these songs were not necessarily born to be sold, to be "listened" to for pleasure or "consumed" by others; other imperatives came to bear upon their coming into being.

Morrison was perhaps at the deepest point of his interest in the metaphysical power of music -- music as healing force.

"Jazz is not a kind of music, it is an approach, and it applies to how one goes about finding their voice, relating to a tradition, stepping into the unknown and swinging" (Ben Sidran).

... Morrison has called it "the sense of wonder," the unconscious living in the now, that seems to fall from us as we make the transition from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience.

Paul McCartney once described the riff of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" as "the riff of the universe... that just keeps going forever."

[Gloria] is simplicity of a near-primal kind... the feel -- that which cannot be transcribed -- is everything.

[Gloria is] so pure, that if no other hint of it but this record existed, there would still be such a thing as rock and roll.

"How can a 51-year old sing that? I can't relate to it. Why am I expected to, anyway, at 51? I wrote it when I was 20. I was never paid for Brown Eyed Girl" (VM).

The memory of it [the Garden] is both a thorn in the side, a reminder of the Fall, but also a spur on to working towards some kind of return.

So there is this literal use of the term [healing] to consider, and it is certainly part of Morrison's deeper interest in music, in its nature and its "secret power."

"Any kind of art or music is involved in healing, whether it's rock 'n' roll or classical music, it's all healing.... All this is just the foreground, but the background is something else."

... the ancient roads are under our feet, criss-crossing what appear to be our fixed navigational material realities, hidden but perceptible.

This is the role of the ancient highway, to provide a link between the "forgotten" reality and the present material circumstances...

"He's after the musical technique of how to live" (Patrick Kavanagh).

Samuel Becket said that the most he could dare to hope for was to make or leave "a stain on the silence".... [His] ambition was to create what he called "a literature of the unword."

"The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (George Duthiut).

Distrust the artist who tells you they know exactly what their work is "about."

In Morrison's art, silence is at the centre, and sometimes when he approaches that centre on a good night onstage -- when something is about to happen -- the conditions need to be absolutely right or it won't happen.... [It is] where the commonplace can become the marvellous.

... silence is a positive presence, rather than a vacuum, or an absence. It is an aspect of being, rather than non-being.

Q: ... [Y]ou seem to sing somewhere between your throat and your heart.... [I]s that the zone you want to both come from and resonate in other people, the heart?

VM: Eventually it'll get into the heart. That's what the eventual goal is -- Exactly.

Why was I writing this kind of material when my contemporaries weren't? So I wanted to find out where I stood and which tradition I came from. Well eventually I found out that the tradition I belonged to was actually my own tradition. It was like being hit over the head with a baseball bat. You find out that what you've been searching for you already are. --VM

58 Comments:

"Biographer Brian Hinton calls it the central song in the album and 'perhaps in Morrison's whole career. "It starts just like 'Cyprus Avenue', no coincidence as the line about 'songs from way back when' hints, and with a walk down the avenue (of dreams), to the sound of a haunted violin. A song of full, blazing sex as well as revelation. The healing here is like that in Arthurian myth, the wounded King restored through the action of the Holy Grail, but it is also through as graphic a seduction, almost, as the original live version of "Gloria"'.

"Author Clinton Heylin concludes that "what makes the song, and indeed Into the Music work is its self-awareness. Gone is the awkward self-consciousness...It is replaced by a newly assured tone, born of a genuine awareness of what he (Morrison) was attempting."

I'm with you on the resonance part, except I don't physically highlight in paper books. But for the most part, any book worth reading at my age is worth reading for the resonance. The resonance wakes something in the heart, and the sum of that which is awakened this way becomes a treasure of the heart. It cannot easily be taken away.

Unfortunately, I cannot listen or view the videos, which I'm certain are great, however, I do get "something" from your words, Bob, and often the words, or rather the meaning they convey in the comments.

For example: "VM: Eventually it'll get into the heart. That's what the eventual goal is -- Exactly."

Indeed. Not only does Van's music, and all truly deep music touch my heart but it becomes a part of my heart.

And it grows, and as it grows it...heals. Literally.

And what he said about the blues, the Resistance it offers, or rather the strength to help me resist, to endure, Indure, and to stand fast...until I get to that moment where I overcome!

That's what truly great music can do, and more...

It conveys or speaks God stuff to my entire Being.

I shudder if I even attempt to imagine a cosmos without truly great music. Can't do it. Thankfully, it's impossible. Truth, Goodness n' Beauty...Love! Simply cannot exist without it.

Indeed, how can one properly praise God without it? Great music is an essential part of the language of O and an essential part of human life.

Well really, Van is the spiritual evolution of music beyond vapid recitations and affectations. He is a worshiper and understands that the glory of his music does not redound only unto himself.

It is a healing wellspring, this music from the Muse of muses. Why shouldn't it be giddy? I was blind and now I see the 7th intervals! Yes, when it gets right next to you, out of you, no. . . through you like a channel, a torrent, a river of life. How can you stand yourself?

You can't. There's no room for even a small self when the Healing is crowding out the noise and the blue and jive and resurrecting it, remaking it new, bornin' it again.

Morrison could be the quintessential cerebral musician of our time without even trying to be. Music itself resonates on many levels, but when it becomes transcendent, that's the magic. Occasionally, an artist will stumble across transcendent material. Morrison, on the other hand, was immersed in it. To be consistently transcendent is almost otherworldly. Or maybe it is...

One highlight of his for me was the 1986 album "No Guru, No Method, No Teacher." And one can't go wrong with Moondance.

a Van tune that for me stands out on its album 'Too Long in Exile'is TILL WE GET THE HEALING DONE [I crave the chorus's bass riff/organ]:

Down those old ancient streetsDown those old ancient roadsBaby, there together we must goTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till you're satisfied with your lifeTill you're satisfied with your lifeTill you're satisfied with your lifeAnd it's running rightAnd it's running rightSometime you've got to sit down and cryWhen you deal with the poison insideTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till you feel the tingle up your spineTill you're satisfied and you're mineTill you feel a tingle up your spineGet the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till you live in the glory of the worldTill you live in the land of the sunTill you feel like your life has just begunTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till we dwell in the house of the LordTill you don't have to worry no moreTill you open a brand new worldTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till it makes you feel alrightTill you're satisfied with your lifeTill you know you live in the lightTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till you look at, well, the mountains every dayTill you wash all your troubles awayAnd you live right here in the dayTill we get the healing doneUntil we get the healing done

Till it's truth and it's beauty, and it's graceTill you've finally found your true placeTill you know your original faceTill we get the healing doneChild, till we get the healing done

When everything is going rightTill you're satisfied with your lifeTill you're living in the lightTill we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

When you feel it, when you feel it in your soulBaby, and you really knowThat you reap just what you sowWhen we get the healing doneTill we get the healing done

Till you know that it's working every timeTill you work it out in your mindAnd you know it straight down the lineTill we get the healing doneMake no worry till we get the healing done

We gonna go back, back to our favorite placeLook at it againSee it all through a different eyesWhen we get the healing doneWhen we get the healing done

RUDHYAR on Virgo :Technique must be learned. Barring very unusual cases, it must be learned from one who is a "master of technique." Thus he who wants to learn the secret of smooth, easy and supremely effective performance has to become an apprentice. He must become objective to his own ways of behavior. He must analyze them and refuse to be blind to their defects. He must be absolutely honest and un-glamoured in the evaluation of any performance: his and others also. He must learn to criticize dispassionately and without prejudice. He must be keen in discrimination. He must be "pure."

sort of on-topic: but check out this strange old & trivial but to me then believable theory of a brainy druggy pal!re the cover of Dylan's SLOW TRAIN COMING.FILE UNDER 'hidden messages'*IMAGEHERE'S theory: the closest image to the viewer is the bent arm---which 'is' an impotent johnson! My pal felt that was BD's intentional """message""" 'He shall rise again' and all

*just now remembering an awkward at my mom's house trying to convince her that 'Cypress Avenue' was 'about' sex or a sexpot's confession!:) Since then, VM's little-girl thing has appeared oft enough to be old hat! she a practical virgo like lusty Van, poo-poo'd the whole idea & probably felt i was too into stuff like that..

It would seem Gagdad has assumed a hermit's life. Does anyone know the cause of his recluse? Just back from travel and in need of a good dose of verticalness.I have been piecing together the intersection of Zarathustra, the Jewish Prophets and Christ. The concept of the Saoshyant was rather striking.

"With this recording, I locate myself squarely within that aspect of music which is fundamental and irreducible: the beauty of the sound. This is what Dane Rudhyar calls "tone-magic"-- a concept derived from ancient practice wherein the quality of the tone itself communicates meaning quite apart from any further arrangement in an 'artifice' of music."

Well, Jon Hassell released one of the landmark ambient albums on ECM, Power Spot. More recently he's released Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, which I haven't heard but is getting great reviews. I just got this one, Quiet Inlet (great title) by Thomas Strønen, and I really like it. Another one I like is Holon by Nik Bärtsch, which has elements of ambient, but still with some jazz meat on the bones.

"You can divide things into hip, pre-hip and post-hip," he says. "Pre-hip and post-hip have things in common: hip is a dangerous part, because you’re totally involved in being au courant. Post-hip means that you’ve punched through the sound barrier, and you’re discovering that clichés can be true; you’re discovering that what we call a cliché can be fundamental. And you then have the courage to be there wholly."

"In order to grasp the enormity of the situation—that we are living in a psychologically geometric space, carved from words, slogging our way through a multidimensional traffic jam where accidents are happening all around you every second—you have to suspend disbelief and try to imagine the unimaginable, to feel intuitively that which is not yet known." -Jon Hassell

he aint no Clown...neither are his VIRGO musical sunsign-matesfrom JOHN CAGE/A. SCHOENBERGthrough GEORGE JONES, JOHN KOERNER, JOHN STEWART [do check him out for inspired rich-baritoned americana]---and 'quicksilver [mercury, get it?] messenger service' was mostly august-sept babies tambien !also Holst & Virgil Thomson, the latter of whom i once dined with

"Bob will begin a new book project within a fortnight. The book will be a success."

You may be right. One wonders what new dimension he will bring to his cosmology.

I have often wondered why the age of Prophets ceased. Was it that people were not in the mood to listen or did they substitute physicists, scientists and philosophers in their stead? Bob makes a very valid observation concerning Darwin's thoughts becoming a religion. Ditto Marx. They have become a "state religion" to the properly indoctrinated (see Ivy League and their admirers). As a state religion, they inspire bigotry and a deadening of the spirit when applying their dogma. They are also very boring.

I've been thinking about the controversy between what Miles Started to do in the late sixties and the reaction from the jazz traditionalists.

Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis define Jazz in a very particular way. Off the top of my head things like:

1) The Blues2) 4/4 swing3) The "spanish tinge"4) Revolving form.

etc.

I am perfectly willing to concede these points, mainly because I have no real dog in this fight. There is so much GREAT music that falls perfectly into that definition of Jazz and I am perfectly fine with that.

But particularly from "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew" on, Miles may have started a whole other tradition of improvisation which one can call Jazz or not. I think it was Jan Gabarek that said something to the effect that after "Bitches Brew" everything changed.

I've been looking deeper into the work of trumpeter Jon Hassell who didn't really come to his approach through jazz, but through contemporary composition. He studied with Stockhausen in Europe and later hung out with American minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley (the inspiration for the repeating patterns of "Baba O'*Riley*). Finally he studied North Indian Raga with Prandit Pran Nath (as did Young and Riley).

But with all that Hassell was also *heavily* influenced by "Bitches Brew".

Some would call this "fusion" but I don't think that's what it really is. Not in the sense that say someone like John Scofield et al is a Jazz + Rock = Fusion.

I think something entirely different came about and it is still hanging around the margins of various genres. There is probably a lot more of it being created in out of the way places and since it doesn't have a name, or a magazine etc it is likely to remain somewhat obscured.

"Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis define Jazz in a very particular way."

Can't speak for Crouch, but I have always thought Wynton Marsalis was nothing more than a museum curator. He has all the technique right, but lacks the inspiration. I guess in his case its a family business.

While Bitches Brew was interesting, I liked Miles much better when he returned to playing a clean horn over a pop ballad. He did a Cyndi Laupner tune that I thought was genius somewhere in the 1980s. Can't remember the name of the tune. I have it around somewhere. My point is that Miles' sound is so distinctive and personal to him that to fudge it up with a lot of distortion seems a sacrilege. Why spend all those years discovering your own sound only to distort it through mechanical gimmickry? If you want to sound like a synthesizer, then play a synthesizer. I guess I am a purist. I have also thought that Miles was a little envious of the guitar during the sixties. Up until the late 50s, the instrument of expression in America had been the trumpet (see Satchmo) and saxophone. Then came the age of the guitar.

That's the one. I heard a live recording of Miles covering this tune and was completely stunned. How he could take a sticky sweet pop ballad and give it a whole new understanding was brilliant. Interesting what a great artist is capable of.

I think a big part of it simply has to do with the idea that "the medium is the message," to coin a phrase. For example, the emergence of the long playing album in the early '50s meant that jazz players could really stretch out, culminating in an album such as A Love Supreme, which is one continuous suite.

Jazz was an album medium way before rock was. Rock was primarily a singles medium, and didn't begin selling albums in huge numbers (Beatles excepted) until about 1967.

So that's when the big money really began flowing in. Which is when the major labels began signing rock acts, including Miles's label, Columbia, which, under Clive Davis, in one year signed Santana, Sly Stone, Joplin, Blood Sweat & Tears, Moby Grape, Laura Nyro, Mike Bloomfield, and a few others I can't think of at the moment.

Anyway, what changed Miles was hearing about the royalty checks of his labelmates, especially Sly Stone, which dwarfed his. Therefore, Bitches Brew is really an attempt to incorporate the funk sounds of Sly, so that Miles could maintain his commercial viability.

And after that, I think it's just a case of inevitable cross-fertilization that occurs as a result of being aware of so many other "musics," i.e., globalization. It's the same with, say, Christianity, which must now deal with a world with very different faith traditions. One way is to just reject them outright, but I think that's a non-starter (as does the Catholic church). Jazz has always integrated whatever came along. It has always been a hybrid music. It's just that today the jazz musician had a much wider selection of sounds to integrate. It's totally artificial to isolate one particular synthesis, as does Marsalis. That is the way of death -- and his music has always struck me as kind of dead, like a museum piece. He's at the cutting edge, only facing backwards instead of forward.

Unfortunately for most neophyte jazzers the attention payed to Wynton's opinions on the PBS Jazz documentary created the incorrect impression that Wynton is considered something of an expert. If Burns had spread his intellectual wings and interviewed a wider range of jazzers his film would have been something greater than the canned "black - white" thingy. Its as if Burns took the opinion of many PBS jazz radio stations that won't play white jazz artists. We have that problem in DC. Nothing like injecting race into something that originally transcended such sentiments. That is the quickest way to kill a living art-form.

I don't at all dispute that Miles' motives were less than purely aesthetic. I guess I am finding what he *did* come up with at that point--for whatever reason--to be very musically fruitful. More so "In a Silent Way" than "Bitches Brew".

Not Jazz. Not Rock. Both but neither.

Or maybe that's merely what I am taking from it...what I *need* (or want?) to take from it. It's certainly where I want to be heading.

Miles went down the path of processing his trumpet at a relatively early stage of signal processing. Whatever one thinks of Hassell...he definitely acheives a "warmer" result with processing his trumpet. I've heard Ron Miles process his trumpet to good results.

But I agree that for most of his career Miles had such a gorgeous, human, almost "tragic" sounding tone, that his use of wah-wah and shrieking in the higher registers was not necessarily an improvement.

But with all due respect I don't see his 80's stuff as anything other than his scattered attempts to cash-in and be somewhat relevant. Not at all my personal favorite Miles timeframe. I find it to be fluff.

Mile's at his most "pure" for me is from "Kind of Blue" through the second quintet up to "Nefertiti" and "Sorcerer". The shift started to occur during "Filles de Kilimanjaro".

"Mile's at his most "pure" for me is from "Kind of Blue" through the second quintet up to "Nefertiti" and "Sorcerer". "

Completely concur. Would add "Sketches of Spain" to the list.

I am particularly fond of this late 50s early 60s moment for jazz. Its almost like a tropical flower that only blooms once in twenty years and only for a few days. That time in music was special. Too bad they couldn't have stretched it further. Drugs and distractions I guess?

During the fusion moment I did like Weather Report and Return to Forever. That too did not last long.

Yes, "Sketches of Spain" is beautiful. That whole period, from the late 50's to the mid- to- late 60's was surely one of those time periods where there was that precarious balance between innovation and tradition.

For the most part the musicians were well-trained and highly knowledgeable and, Miles in particular, maintained a certain "classical" balance to their innovations.

Not always of course. But their was a sense of humanity and depth to what they did.

I am sometimes pessimistic as to how much the same can be done today. But I try to play my small part in it all...I hope I do, anyway.

Finding that same balance in our own changed circumstances is not so easy. I guess if was, everyone could do it...as the saying goes.

Re Miles' artistry -- I don't dispute that at all. However, part of it is that he made a lot of money, and could therefore employ the greatest sidemen -- guys all capable of leading their own bands but for the financial constraints.

Miles was no fool in that sense, and yes he had the ability to PAY the for the best players. Few if any Jazz guys really did at that particular point in time.

That's the greatness of Jazz! (plus or minus the cocaine...or earlier than that--- heroin). Not only did Miles have his own "voice" and musical vision but he was able to bring together incredible musicians that themselves had a distinctive, well-developed voice and vision. And for the most part get out of their way.

(something I wish was more often the case...but I digress!)

You are absolutely right, it would have been unlikely that given all these great musicians in one room that they would fail to create something interesting.

And let's not leave out Teo Macero...from what I've read Miles wasn't exactly "hands on" regarding the post-production.

So maybe when I say "Miles" I am, in this case, taking the most visible part as representative for the whole.

"It has always been a hybrid music. It's just that today the jazz musician had a much wider selection of sounds to integrate."

I guess for me that brings up the seemingly unanswerable question...what *is* Jazz?

I've heard it said that Jazz is something that Jazz musicians do (and really, how useful is such a circular definition?).

Bill Frisell is quoted as saying that, "jazz is an approach, not a distinct sound." What is that approach and how is it distinguished from other approaches to improvisation?

Some would say Frisell doesn't play Jazz. Is the lifelong engagement with this particular tradition i.e. learning the repertoire, being able to play all the standards etc? Is it taking one's main inspiration from the canonical jazz greats?

I do like the idea of Jazz as an approach rather than a style or a rigid genre. That it is more an attempt to form an integrated improvisational voice in light of the total music possibilities while retaining a certain "core" that is recognizably "Jazz".

~A NY record exec./art director type threw such a '70s bash, Miles was guest of honor; in the back room a mirror was proffered by the host w/ little lines for each inclubber present, a dagger there used to chop the powder. Miles' turn: he took the mirror and with the dagger pushed all the lines into one biggie and snorted it up a nostril. He raised the dagger and hissed to the host "Where's m'other line mothaf----??"

"I've heard it said that Jazz is something that Jazz musicians do (and really, how useful is such a circular definition?)."

My take is they twist and stretch the square into something sublime. Keep the melody but suspend, flatten or sharpen the chords. By in large that's what I see as the major difference. Beyond that its a duel with your instrument to see if you can speak honestly to the sound. Kind of like blues but wider and much more unpredictable.

I've sometimes thought of Jazz as a form of Meta-blues. Like N. Indian Raga to me Jazz is an "infinite game" and does transcend "genre" at least far more so than other forms i.e. it is a universal musical matrix that contains all other musics. At least potentially.

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Who?! spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!